


Visage of Monsters

by sistabro



Series: Selections from a Purgatory Bestiary [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s07e23 Survival of the Fittest, Gen, Monsters, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 11:52:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistabro/pseuds/sistabro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a familiar thread running throughout Purgatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visage of Monsters

[](http://amartinsdebarros.deviantart.com/)   
Cavalcade by [Amartinsdebarros](http://amartinsdebarros.deviantart.com/)

Castiel is fascinated by the monsters. He is often afraid of them, too — afraid for Dean really — but even as he flees them and fights them, the humming thread of fascination remains. There are so many kinds of monsters here: beautiful, horrifying, benign, violent, unfathomable. Yet all of them, no matter how fantastic their form, are familiar, tainted with some recognizable aspect amidst the strangeness

It is a bizarre evolution that is happening here, broken discarded things reshaping themselves into echoes of Earth. Castiel can see it in the silhouette of a horse in a nest of writhing slug like things, in the almost tiger swimming in the giant eye, the ravenous alien castles in the sand, the crisp curve of a typeset letter crawling across a floating face. Some of the things in the waters here would not be the strangest fish in the seas back home.

He thinks the astronomers of old struck a larger truth when they thought the universe revolved around the Earth.

Heaven, Hell, and now Purgatory: Castiel has visited them all and all of them dream of Earth. Nightmares for Hell and daydreams for Heaven, there are no surprises there. But Purgatory, she is Earth’s writhing shadow. Vivacious and unfettered like Heaven and Hell can never be. A place of broken things and outcasts and discards that seethe with a creative life all their own.

Purgatory dreams back, Castiel thinks. That is the difference. He rolls the truth of it in his mind and feels it settle. Poets and painters on Earth, they slumber here in this land of mismatched, impossible things. There is some deep connection that goes both ways, uneven and lopsided, but there. A hope born in the visage of monsters that there may be a way back yet.


End file.
